Amyl and the Sniffers move to L.A. and get a whiff of punk glory on ‘Cartoon Darkness’
Amyl and the Sniffers have always appreciated any small bit of good news. Even when the Australian punk rock quartet recorded its charmingly raw debut EP, “Giddy Up,” in a single night and released it online in 2016, the initial 100 streams were reward enough.
“To us, that was massive,” says singer Amy Taylor, aka “Amyl,” with a grin. “We get one play on local community radio and we’re like, ‘We’re massive. We’ve made it.’ You get a support slot in a 200-capacity room, we’re like, ‘We’ve made it.’ It’s really hard to get a perspective bigger than what we can see. … We’re very much appreciative of what’s happening rather than thinking about what might happen so much.”
Amyl and the Sniffers feel the same way about their third album, “Cartoon Darkness,” released Oct. 25, a potent collection of snarly, ecstatic rock tunes and the occasional ballad. Its first single, “U Should Not Be Doing That,” quickly earned millions of Spotify listens and heavy rotation for its music video (1.6 million views on YouTube alone), showing Taylor and a new companion stomping across Los Angeles as she sings lyrics of defiant self-worth.
“I am trying my best to get it on,” she sings, in her distinctively combative, percussive, very Australian voice. “Not everybody makes it out alive / When they are young.”
Fans are drawn to the Sniffers’ sound and attitude, which taps into the rowdy spirit of first-generation punk rock, along with a feisty, euphoric blond singer moving nonstop and usually dressed in a bikini top and shorts. The album comes two months after the band opened for a Foo Fighters concert at BMO Stadium in August, followed days later by two sold-out shows at the Fonda Theatre in Hollywood.
“Right now I think they’re the best rock band on the planet,” says Nick Launay, producer of “Cartoon Darkness,” in a phone interview. Launay has frequently worked with modern rock acts such as the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Idles and Nick Cave, but his career stretches back to the early U.K. punk and postpunk scenes.
“If they had been around in the ’70s, they would’ve been just as important back then,” he declares of the Sniffers. “They would’ve given everybody a run for their money.”
Launay says his mission in the studio was simply to fully capture the urgency of the band’s live shows. Aside from that, the new album’s 13 songs show a noticeable evolution to their punk rock sound, which remains connected to their early pub-crawling days without getting in the way of growth and the increasing power of their delivery.
“I think we’ve always been confident,” says Taylor. “It’s just that we’ve gotten better. Even when we weren’t very good, we were confident, but now the skills are slowly catching up to the confidence.”
The Aussie quartet is gathered on a recent afternoon around a Griffith Park picnic table, where a small herd of little kids makes a racket on the grass nearby. Taylor is dressed in a short black leather jacket, matching shorts and knee-high boots with stiletto heels. Pinned to her chest is a 2 Live Crew button.
Her three male bandmates are stylishly scruffy and tattooed rockers: guitarist Declan Mehrtens, drummer Bryce Wilson and bassist Gus Romer. Earlier this year, Taylor and Mehrtens moved to the U.S. and found places in L.A., while the others theoretically remain based in Melbourne. That kind of distance between bandmates might seem like a problem for a thriving rock act, but they’ve rarely been apart this last year, with only short breaks between recording the album, shooting music videos, a U.S. tour, then linking up again in Australia.
“We’ve been together this year pretty much every day, it feels like,” says Wilson.
Taylor adds, “We see each other all the time. It’s such an international project, we don’t live anywhere anyway.” She turns to Romer and Wilson and adds, “They might live in Australia, but it’s just where they store their crap.”
Los Angeles already feels very much like home to the singer and the guitarist. Mehrtens decided to move here after enjoying a Dodgers-Padres postseason game, and Taylor has befriended local rockers including Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Arrow De Wilde of Starcrawler.
They are back on the road for a European tour that started Nov. 3 in Dublin and return for a North American tour in the spring.
Their work with producer Launay began by recording two songs last year at Sunset Sound, including “U Should Not Be Doing That,” released as a single in May. In the lyrics, Taylor pushes back against the naysayers that she says the band has faced at every step.
“At the end of the day, nothing’s really stopped me, and nothing probably will because I like doing it more than I care about what other people think,” Taylor says with casual defiance.
The new album opens with the driving noisy rock riffing of “Jerkin,’” as Taylor pushes back against haters with boasts and joyous profanity: “Last time I checked, I got success / Cuz the losers are online and they are obsessed / Typin’.”
There’s also the crazed racket of “Motorbike Song” and the alluring ballad “Big Dreams,” written on acoustic guitar and matched in tone by a wistful music video directed by longtime collaborator John Angus Stewart. The clip has each of the band members on the back of motorcycles cruising across a wide-open desert landscape.
Out front, Taylor sings from the back of a chopper, her vocals understated and almost resigned as she laments for those who feel stuck in place: “It isn’t easy when the town’s full of broken hearts / Can you be holding on any tighter? / Just take a breath and get out of this place / I know you can just get yourself together.”
There are hip-hop influences too, says Taylor. “Beastie Boys was big on this album,” she explains, “just ’cause they’re awesome and their phrasing is cool and we listen to a lot of them.”
Along the way, their producer has learned how to interpret what he calls “Amy Language.”
As one example, while Launay was mixing tracks for 2021’s “Comfort to Me,” Taylor was unhappy with the sound of “Hertz,” calling the song mix “too Lambo” — short for the luxury sports car Lamborghini. So she sent Launay a picture of a Subaru doing doughnuts on the asphalt as a better example to follow. “Like that,” she wrote him, “only driven by a hot Aussie chick … but she’s a politician.”
“Even though that sounds like crazy instructions, I knew exactly what she meant,” says Launay, who lived in Australia for a decade. “I mixed it rawer, wilder, sexier and put a couple of clever bits in there, sent it to her, and she goes, ‘Yep, that’s it. Next!’”
Taylor grew up there in Mullumbimby, a small hamlet in northern New South Wales, and a town she describes as “dirty hippie, no shoes, like antivax, organic food.” Rapper Iggy Azalea is also from there, and left for the U.S. at age 16. Azalea’s mother had a cleaning business that Taylor’s mom worked for briefly.
The band began in a house shared by Taylor, Mehrtens, Wilson and former member Calum Newton in beachside St. Kilda, a suburb of Melbourne. Taylor worked at a supermarket and had purchased a used drumkit for about $50 that she kept in her bedroom.
“We went to live music all the time — five, six nights a week,” says Taylor of their nightlife habits. “There’d be lots of house parties and bands would play in the backyard. I would freestyle rap a lot at the parties. It was my party trick. If it was a house show, I’d be like, can I get on the mic? Some bands were playing and I’d just like yelp words.”
That impulse evolved into forming a band. “We kind of wanted to sound like a B-52’s when we started,” says Taylor. “But we just couldn’t play good enough. So we sounded like this. But we liked the aggression of the music.”
As a new group, they were part of an Aussie garage-band scene with contemporaries like the Cosmic Psychos, Drunk Mums and Dumb Punts. At those first club performances, it was largely an older crowd turning out, no doubt connecting the Sniffers’ racket to their memories of early punk rock. “When we first started it’d probably be like 80% men over 50 — like looking out at a bloody dozen eggs,” she says of the gathering of gray and bald heads.
Their crowds have evolved a lot since then. During their two-night run at the Fonda, the dance floor was filled with young fans whom Taylor happily describes as “young frothers, just frothing about life, like rabid frothing,” she says with a laugh. “They’re excited and they’re young and they’re drinking for the first time and they’ve got mullets and they’re like, ‘Yeah!’ Our crowd’s usually very excitable people in the same way that I’m excitable.”
One more thing has changed: For most of the band’s career, Mehrtens spelled his last name as “Martens,” partly for simplicity’s sake but also because he wore Doc Martens boots. He adopted “Dec Martens” as a kind of punk rock alias, like the Germs’ Darby Crash or Pat Smear. He’s reverted to the correct spelling as a sign that the band has lasted well beyond its initial existence as a lark among friends.
“When I did that, I didn’t know that we were going to be getting three, four … albums in,” he says of his earlier nickname. “Now there’s visas involved, and I want people to know that it’s me who’s on the album.”
Being in the band also has changed Taylor’s perspective on many things. Now that she’s an accomplished lyricist, she pays more attention to the written word.
“I hated books. Now I love reading books and read all the time,” the singer says, then adds with a laugh, “Before, my God, I only had like 20 words in my vocabulary. Now I’ve got at least a hundred, so that helps. I love the riddles of phrasing and trying to get phrasing in a different kind of puzzle-y way.”
Romer jumps in, adding with a grin, “Sometimes she has a new big word and I’m very impressed.”
The biggest entertainment stories
Get our big stories about Hollywood, film, television, music, arts, culture and more right in your inbox as soon as they publish.
You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.
